Loops, Music Production Apps, and Hardware

sequencism is a music sketchbook tool that allows the creation of short and simple pieces of music. It is designed to provide a traditional user interface of track and piano roll editors, while taking advantage of the touch-screen capabilities of the iPad. It also includes other helper tools, such as chord helper tracks.

Note that the main goal of this app is to work as a sketchbook, thus it is not recommended to use sequencism to produce complex songs or to play songs live on stage.

– Each section row now contains a play button with the section name, an arpeggiator pattern view and a chord sequence view. You can start playing a section or jump to another section just by tapping on a section’s play button. You can now see arpeggiator patterns and chord sequences of all your sections right on the main view. So it is now much easier to see what is currently playing and what you need to play next.

– Custom names for sections. You can now give your sections custom names. Tap on the edit button at the right of the navigation bar. Press rename on the required section.

– Section reordering was improved. Now to reorder a section just long-press on it and move it around.

CHORD SEQUENCE EDITOR REDESIGNED
– Each chord is now represented as a tile instead of a row. So it is now a lot more compact and allows you to fit more chords into one screen. The currently edited chord is indicated by a color frame around it. You can now edit the selected chord while the whole chord sequence is playing. It is much more convenient because you can hear the changes you make in the context of the full sequence.

– Duration slider was removed. Now, to change a chord duration you use the new picker control’s column with label “Beats”.

– Now when you add a new chord, instead of adding a default C major chord to the end of the sequence, the currently selected chord is copied and inserted after the selected chord. Selection is then moved to the newly added chord allowing you to edit it right away if you need to.

– If the sequence is currently playing and you select a chord that was not selected before, the playhead will not jump to that chord. This allows you to edit the chords of the sequence without disrupting the music flow. But if you still want to jump between chords, tap on a chord one more time, and it will start playing after the currently played chord is played to the end. If you want to jump to the selected chord right away, tap on it two times more after the selection tap. To summarize: 1 tap = selection, 2 taps = selection and quantized jump, 3 taps = selection and immediate jump.

– Chord reordering was also improved. To change a chord position, long-press on it and move it wherever you want it to be.

ARPEGGIATOR EDITOR
– Per-track mute buttons were added.

– Move tool added. You can now move the selected track along the arpeggiator grid.

– Per-track octave param added. You can now change the octave of the selected track.

– Per-track voice number param added. You can now set the number of voices per a track. When you set this param to the value more than one, the track will be splitted to the multiple parallel lines. You can use it to quickly create full chord parts with just one track(color). Before that improvement, you would need to use multiple tracks for that task.

– Portrait orientation support for iPhone. You can now edit arpeggiator sequence in both portrait and landscape orientations. When you are in the portrait orientation on an iPhone, you see only a part of the arpeggiator sequence. To scroll through it you use a two finger pan gesture (put two fingers on the arpeggiator grid and slide them left and right). On the landscape orientation on an iPhone, the grid is fit to the screen so you can see the whole sequence.

– Undo/redo buttons added. You can now go back and forth in the history of edits in the arpeggiator editor.

– “Clear all” button added. You can now clear the whole arpeggiator pattern at once.

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
– Several unexpected crash cases were fixed.

– Editing performance is improved. The chord sequence and arpeggiator sequence editing procedures were optimized to provide much smoother experience when editing a section while the app is playing.

iDensity is a new real-time software designed for asynchronous sound file granulation, a genuine granular playground able to generate a wide range of usual and not so usual effects: time/pitch shifting, time/pitch jittering, intricate textures, grain fountain/pulverizer, recording and manipulation of buffers, complex scrub pad exploration, dynamic envelope shape and many more. iDensity for iPad will give you all the basic and advanced tools you need to manipulate sound in subtle and surprising ways. All these features are packed in an optimized, user-friendly, visually sharp interface that is easy to access when fast-improvising live, composing in a studio, or sound designing at home and on the go! You will have the power, freedom, and flexibility to create like never before – on your iPad! Control and shape grains, anytime, anywhere with Density for iPad.

Ops is a modular synthesiser designed to make it easy to create and explore sound interactively with a touch screen. Ops does away with patch cords, instead using a system of connected blocks with a clear signal flow.

The blocks, called ops, are joined together into structures by dragging and dropping them on screen. Structures can easily be copied and varied to build-up rich, interesting results.

There are ops to perform a wide range of functions, including interaction, signal generation, effects processing, control, audio input, sample playback and record, MIDI input, and pitch and rhythm manipulation.

What’s New in Version 1.1.1
– sample record and playback ops
– play and edit structures at the same time
– full undo/redo
– user interface improvements
– merge load
– Boolean and more maths ops

ElliottGarage presents EGDR606, a drum machine that emulates the vintage hardware from the 80’s with the easiness of modern software.

Its realistic and clear interface recalls the analog machine from the past, for all the vintage fanatics.
You can play with the groove presets included or you can create your own beat to play along your favorite song via InterApp, Audiobus, Core MIDI and clock MIDI.

You can also share your drum patterns with iTunes filse sharing or Audio Copy.

iPad Loops is a music app blog dedicated to exposing the best iPad apps for iOS musicians, producers, and Djs. This is not a database of every app. It is, however, one of useful recommendations from someone with many years in music production. I try to update it on a daily basis (ok sometimes every two days) and I do my best to post useful apps only. My name is Jason Donnelly (Dj Puzzle).
You might know me from my royalty free loop packs and sound design. Some of the apps that contain my loops are Retronyms AudioCopy, LP-5, iPRO.DJSAMPLER, Looptastic, and Audio Elements. My work is published by Magix Soundtrack Loops, Sample Logic, Pakotec, Loopmasters, Acoustica, Xmix, Sound Trends, and many more. Subscribe to our RSS feed below to get updated when new apps are posted.